The failed first half of his life flashed before Yulianka’s eyes like a series of images.
Born into an average family, like all children from ordinary households, he had no other way out. He endured more than a decade of arduous studying, got into college, and finally graduated. After working for a few years, full of ambition, he scraped together enough money—both from his own years of frugality and his parents’ savings—to open a veterinary clinic in Yehai.
The very year the clinic opened, a major event occurred in the medical world—the medical proxy agents powered by artificial intelligence received their practice licenses from the Federal Ministry of Health.
Not only doctors were impacted, but veterinarians too.
People only needed to consult online, connect via video, use simple home diagnostic devices to detect data, and the AI medical agent on the network could quickly diagnose the illness, prescribe medicine directly, and have the drugs delivered to their door.
The entire process was streamlined and fast—people didn’t even need to leave their homes.
Later, when home diagnostic devices developed injection treatment functions, even the last bit of business at the clinic disappeared.
Business plummeted, and Yulianka was at his wits’ end.
At his lowest point, Yulianka even thought—maybe it would be better to just die. Or pick up a knife and stab a few random people on the street—if his life was this terrible, then others shouldn’t expect to live well either.
Then one day, a speck of green light entered his body, and everything changed.
At that time, the Silence had not yet occurred. When Inaya brought her parrot to the clinic, he noticed a flash of green light in her eyes. They chatted casually for a bit, and the girl couldn’t help but reveal that she was attending a hypnosis workshop. Recently, her ability to hypnotize others had become unexpectedly effective.
Once, out of sheer boredom, she tried hypnotizing the receptionist at his clinic.
When the hypnotic vision appeared in Yulianka’s mind, he was surprised too—but soon, he figured out exactly what was going on.
The Silence began soon afterward.
For the first time in his life, Yulianka felt he had become someone who could control everything.
In the past, he could only control the various small animals on the operating table—cats, dogs, little birds, and golden hamsters—manipulating their bodies, controlling their lives. That was the only pleasure in an otherwise bleak career.
Now it was different. What he could control were people.
Other people, including those with special abilities, were nothing more than chess pieces in his hands—completely unable to resist.
This time on Yehai No. 7, he happened to encounter that hypnotist, Inaya, again.
She was a chess piece he could manipulate at will. Through her, he could in turn control others—simple and convenient.
Controlling the boy who got off in the town and making him gouge out his own eyes in a hallucination—was just a casual move.
How could he let them get off the train?
As long as they all stayed on this train, he would have a whole train full of people to toy with as he pleased.
They were all terrified by the horrific situation, trembling, respectful toward him, trusting him, treating him like a real doctor, willing to hand over their bodies, let him cut and handle them however he liked. Everything filled him with an unprecedented sense of satisfaction.
What a wonderful new world this was.
Kirill was a college friend who knew Yehai No. 7 very well. He had mentioned before that the old tracks of Yehai No. 7 formed a loop. This time, by luck, the switch just happened to fall onto the old circular track.
Let this train continue running like this, endlessly and without beginning or end.
Later, the girl with the mechanical arm in front of him said that far to the northwest, there was a shelter where one could make sound.
This train was already so good—why go to a shelter?
Anyway, on the first day the Silence began, he had already asked the assistant at the clinic to help cut out his vocal cords.
He could no longer make any sound, so there was basically no more danger. In a few more days, once he was done playing on this train, maybe he would have the train change direction and actually go to that shelter in the northwest.
Maybe.
Everything was up to his whim. Anyway, not now.
But today on the train, when the girl grabbed his arm and tried to tear him in half, he made a mistake.
He used the other bit of green light in his body.
That green light was something he had secretly gone back to the station entrance to retrieve while they were repairing the train. He found it inside a mutated turnstile.
The girl’s mechanical arm was very useful—she had killed the turnstile, but hadn’t taken the green light. It was as if she didn’t really understand what the green light was.
But Yulianka understood.
At the time, he thought—with just a little green light in his body, he was already this powerful. What if he had a bit more?
When the turnstile’s green light entered his body, the bit of green light he already had lunged at it like a hungry wolf, as if desperate to swallow it whole.
But he had firmly restrained it, didn’t let it move.
He couldn’t bear to let it.
Maybe letting it devour the new light would increase his power—but Yulianka had greater ambitions.
Controlling other ability users was good, but it still depended on others. It would be better if he had an offensive ability of his own.
The turnstile looked very ferocious. Maybe it could grant him a new power.
In the end, on the train, at the critical moment when he was about to be torn apart by the girl, Yulianka instinctively activated the green light he had taken from the turnstile.
Something strange happened. His body transformed completely.
The transformation wasn’t entirely a bad thing—he managed to slip away from her mechanical grip.
But it seemed his body couldn’t return to normal.
And his mind was becoming increasingly unclear. His thoughts were in chaos. In his head, only one stubborn thought remained:
They must not be allowed to reach the shelter. The train must stay on the circular track. For his sake, it must stay on the circular track forever.
That heart was now clutched in her hand.
Yulianka stared at it, blankly thinking—just going by feeling, she probably pulled it out from his neck, right?
How did the heart end up in that location?
In a daze, it felt like he was back many years ago.
In a university classroom, the midsummer breeze blew in through the open window. The professor took out a plastic heart model, held it in his hand, raised it up to show everyone its structure.
At that time, the wind was warm, he was still young, felt like everything was unknown, everything was full of hope, as if there were endless possibilities, completely unaware of what the future held for him.
A mess of thoughts surged into his mind—but it was only for a moment.
The next second, her mechanical fingers suddenly clenched tight.
Flesh and blood splattered.
Yulianka stopped moving, collapsed silently and limply.
Pei Ran picked up the transmitter that had fallen nearby.
The transmitter’s structure was very simple, with only a push-pull joystick that moved left and right. At the moment, it was positioned to the left. The characters beside it had been scorched and melted—completely unreadable.
Pei Ran pulled the joystick to the right, silently praying that the device hadn’t been burned out.
She stood up, carrying the metal sphere on her back, holding the transmitter in hand, and gazed into the distance toward the bottom of the dam, in the direction of Yehai No. 7.
Yehai No. 7 still had its lights on, lying motionless in the darkness of the plains. The switch point ahead was hidden in the night—she couldn’t tell if it had changed or not.
A moment later—
“Dong—”
“Dong—”
“Dong—”
Amid the rumbling sound of the dam collapsing, the metallic clanging echoed faintly from afar.
It was Ai Xia. She had sent the signal as agreed.
W: “The switch has been pulled back.”
“Yes,” Pei Ran let out a breath of relief.
It hadn’t been all for nothing.
Pei Ran bent down and lifted open Yulianka’s chest cavity, searching inside.
As expected, two points of green light were hidden within. One was slightly brighter, the other a bit dimmer, resting beside the place where the mutated heart had originally been.
The brighter one was likely Yulianka’s own. The dimmer one looked familiar—it was the one from the turnstile at the station entrance.
Pei Ran stared at them, her fingertip hovering an inch away.
Last time, her green light had devoured the pipeline worker’s green light without any incident. But after Yulianka stole the turnstile’s green light, his body had undergone strange changes.
Inside her, Green Light No. 2 stirred, ready to act.
But Green Light No. 1 also moved—as if it had smelled the aroma of fried chicken in a dream, it suddenly snapped awake and started dashing wildly inside her.
Pei Ran could almost feel their cries:
Takeout! Takeout! Takeout!
Pei Ran gathered her courage and reached forward with her finger.
The two points of green light in Yulianka’s body immediately entered her fingertip.
Green Light No. 1 was as domineering as always—without hesitation, it charged forward and swallowed the turnstile’s green light in one gulp.
It stopped in front of Yulianka’s original green light, locked in a standoff, seemingly unsure how to bite down. Just like with Shige Ye’s Green Light No. 2, it seemed that—for now—it still couldn’t consume it.
Yulianka’s green light trembled and shrank away, voluntarily finding a corner to hide in.
Nothing strange occurred in her body. Pei Ran stood up in the night wind.
She didn’t look in the direction of the train, but turned her head instead.
The top of the Tanggu Dam stretched out like the spine of a long dragon, crossing the wide river, its end nowhere in sight—at this moment, it was undulating like waves.
The surface of the reservoir was no longer calm—waves rippled out layer by layer, following the tremors of the dam.
The dam was on the verge of collapse.
- ••
Black Well Base.
Sixty-one hours into the Silence.
The meeting in the small conference room had already ended, but Marshal Vina and several other military members of the temporary decision-making committee hadn’t left. They were still in the command center, monitoring the progress of Phase II of the shielding layer project.
But at this moment, W was speaking about something else—something very important.
His calm voice echoed in the main hall:
“It was witnessed firsthand by my patrol robot. The Tanggu Dam has already been contaminated and turned into a fusion entity. So there is currently a very high possibility that…”
The Tanggu Dam was the largest water conservancy hub in the Federation. Above it sat the vast Tanggu Reservoir, with an astonishing water capacity. Marshal Vina had already realized the severity of the situation.
She asked, “Will it collapse?”
“Yes,” W said. “The Tanggu Dam is moving.”
What Agent W had just said was so unbelievable that everyone wore a look of utter disbelief.
W said no more. The large screen immediately switched to a new feed.
The camera’s angle was low, about at a person’s waist height, but the vantage point was extremely high—providing a broad, sweeping view.
Through the night-vision lens, everything was crystal clear. In front of them stretched the vast Tanggu Reservoir, now churning with waves.
Equally unsettling was the rolling, heaving motion of the concrete dam itself. Thunderous rumbling came in wave after wave.
Everyone fell silent. After a long pause, Song Wan finally said, “It’s alive.”
“Yes,” W replied.
Until now, no one within Black Well had ever personally witnessed a fusion entity of such colossal size. This enormous structure had actually begun to move—like a living organism.
W: “It’s not just alive. Judging from its overall posture, it appears to be moving toward the northern bank of the Yala River. It looks like it wants to come ashore.”
That sounded completely insane—but the facts were right there before their eyes.
Everyone in the room understood exactly what this meant.
If the dam was moving toward the shore, the structure would no longer hold back the reservoir. The entirety of Tanggu Reservoir’s waters would pour down in a deluge. The floodwaters would rush downstream at incredible speed, sweeping away everything in their path.
W’s voice remained calm: “Marshal Vina, I need to apply for emergency special approval to immediately send warning messages to all downstream residents, instructing them to prepare for flooding at once.”
The situation was critical—every second counted.
Marshal Vina had full authority to make decisions regarding the issuance of such alerts. She agreed almost instantly: “Of course you can.”
Someone spoke up: “But what the residents downstream can do in such a short time is very limited.”
The speed of the flood would be extremely fast. Escape would be impossible—especially now, with no means of transportation.
In the command center, many people had gone pale.
The Xipu Plain was densely populated, dotted with cities both large and small. Many people in this very room had family and friends living downstream of the Tanggu Dam.
A heavy, suffocating silence filled the air.
Someone whispered,
“Now that they’ve received the warning, at least they can say goodbye to their loved ones. If they believe in anything, there’s still time to pray.”
Marshal Vina immediately turned her head and fixed her gaze on the person who had spoken.
No one dared to say another word.
But everyone understood—he was right. The countless residents in the towns and villages downstream wouldn’t have time to do anything. All they could do was leave it to fate.
- ••
On Tanggu Dam.
Pei Ran’s wristband vibrated. It was a message from Black Well.
Pei Ran opened it. Inside was a full set of images. The first one depicted the scene of Tanggu Dam collapsing.
Then came images of the floodwaters surging out, engulfing everything.
The rest of the pictures illustrated various self-rescue methods during flooding: people climbing to high ground, gathering every floating object in the house—like placing a baby inside a large washbasin that could float.
There were also illustrations about the following issues: drinking water, food safety, disease, epidemics, and so on.
There would be no rescue. People would have to save themselves.
Pei Ran scanned through the set. To draw such detailed images in such a short time—only AI could have done it. It was probably W’s work again.
“Dong—”
“Dong—”
“Dong—”
The metallic clanging echoed again from far below the dam.
It was Ai Xia—probably afraid Pei Ran hadn’t heard the first time—knocking again. The switch had been pulled. Yehai No. 7 was ready to leave.
On the dam’s undulating dragon-spine, Pei Ran saw something.
In the distance, at the center section of the dam where the tremors were most intense, a strange, massive object was bulging upward from the concrete wall.
At first, it was just a swelling lump, writhing as it grew taller and taller. Finally, it broke through—emerging like the upper half of a human body, while its lower half remained fused with the dam.
It stretched out its arms, reaching toward the northern bank of the Yala River, screaming silently, struggling.
The dam continued twisting and tearing along with its movements. Cracks split open across the dam’s surface, massive chunks of concrete breaking off and tumbling into the river below, splashing up huge plumes of white water.
W spoke calmly, “Pei Ran, this place is going to collapse. You have to leave now.”
Pei Ran stared at the gigantic humanoid form made of concrete.
“W,” she suddenly said, “Tonight you said that you humans only care about gaining power, and don’t really care about the lives of your own kind. I want to tell you—humans may not be all that great, but we’re not as terrible as you say either.”
W paused, stunned. “Pei Ran?”
Pei Ran had already started running.
She sprinted along the long top of the Tanggu Dam, toward the giant concrete figure—away from Yehai No. 7, in the opposite direction.